Sign in Subscribe
Recipes

Orange Cardamom Ginger Biscotti

The traditional Italian cookie, with citrus and spice flavors.

Humu Trott

• 6 min read
Two biscotti cookies are on a small plate. You can see small pieces of ginger and almonds in the cookies.
Orange Cardamom Ginger Biscotti
audio-thumbnail
Orange Cardamom Ginger Biscotti
0:00
/389.825375

I used to overlook biscotti. They're hard, dry, and often boring. But that's because no one had explained to me that you're supposed to dunk them quickly in a drink! Oh goodness, I am a bozo. It should have been obvious—I mean, they put them right there next to the cashier at coffee shops.

A quick dip, and they come alive. Now I love them. I have them with coffee, but tea works, and traditionally they're served with a sweet after-dinner wine.

What I have come to especially love about biscotti is that you can make a ton all at once and they don't get stale. I mean, they can't get any staler, really. They last for weeks! Last summer, I brought three different flavors to Camp Mather and handed them out to any early riser staff or campers I could find, before breakfast. I was the weird biscotti lady.

The traditional recipe calls for almonds and aniseed, and I do love that, but I came up with this variation that I maybe love even more: orange, cardamom and ginger. (And also almonds, they're kinda a default biscotti feature.)

A bag of ginger chips, a small jar of ground cardamom, and an orange.
Orange, cardamom, and ginger.

The orange flavor comes from orange zest, which gets rubbed into the sugar. I use ground cardamom, which I get from Penzey's. Penzey's always has great spices, but the excellence of their ground cardamom is especially noticeable. If your ground cardamom is sad, you may want to consider getting whole cardamom pods and grinding up the seeds yourself in a mortar & pestle. For ginger, I use Ginger Chips from The Ginger People, they're little hunks of crystallized ginger that are great for baking.

These are all flavors that go great with coffee, but I haven't tried them with dessert wine. Please try it and report back. For science.

A container of Crisco shortening is on a digital scale, which reads -46 grams. A spoon above the container has removed some shortening.

The dough calls for a quarter cup of vegetable shortening. Rather than wrestle the stuff into a measuring cup, and back out again, bust out your scale! Put your tub of shortening on the scale, tare the scale (reset it to zero), then remove shortening until it reads -46 grams. Bam, you just removed a quarter cup. So much faster, easier, and cleaner. I have a whole post on switching to metric and using a scale. It makes a lot of things easier in the kitchen.

Biscotti cookies get baked twice: the first time as three long logs, then the baked logs get cut up into about 60 individual cookies and they get baked a second time. It looks a little something like this:

Two unbaked, unshaped logs of biscotti dough are side by side on a parchment-lined baking sheet.
The two logs of biscotti dough have now been shaped into flattened, even bars.
The two logs have now been baked, and they've puffed up a bit. They're golden brown.
One of the logs is being cut on a cutting board with a serrated bread knife. The cuts are diagonal, to get an elongated cookie.
The individual cookies are arranged back onto the parchment-lined baking sheet. They won't grow more, so they're only about a 1/4 inch apart.
Two of the final baked cookies are on a small plate. They are golden brown.

1) roughly shaped logs, 2) final shaped logs, 3) baked logs, 4) cutting the logs into cookies on a diagonal, 5) the cut cookies arranged closely on a baking sheet for their final bake, 6) the final cookies.

This recipe is a variation I created based on Traditional Italian Biscotti from the book King Arthur's Baking Companion.

Orange Cardamom Ginger Biscotti

Print the recipe

Ingredients

  • 4 tbsp unsalted butter (half a stick), room temperature
  • ¼ cup (46g) vegetable shortening
  • ¾ cup (150g) sugar
  • zest from 1 orange
  • 3 large eggs, room temperature
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1¼ tsp ground cardamom
  • ⅛ tsp lemon oil
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • ¾ tsp kosher salt
  • 3 cups (360 g) all-purpose flour
  • ¾ cup (85g) slivered almonds, toasted 1
  • ½ cup (67g) crystallized ginger chips

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 365° convection (375° conventional).
  2. Line two baking sheets with parchment.
  3. Rub orange zest into the sugar thoroughly.
  4. In a large bowl, beat the orange sugar, butter, and shortening.
  5. Add the eggs, one at a time, incorporating well and scraping the sides of the bowl as neccessary.
  6. Beat in the vanilla, cardamom, lemon oil, baking powder, and salt.
  7. Mix in the flour, one cup at a time, to make a cohesive, well-mixed dough.
  8. Stir in the almonds and ginger chips, ensuring they’re distributed throughout the dough.
  9. Transfer the dough onto a lightly oiled work surface. Divide it into three equal pieces, each piece will be about 300g. Shape each piece into a rough log.
  10. Transfer the logs to the baking sheets, two on one sheet (with at least 3” space between), one on the other. With wet fingers, smooth the logs into smooth-topped rectangles about 12” long x 2 ½” wide x 1” thick.
  11. Bake the logs for 20 to 25 minutes, until they’re beginning to brown at the edges. Rotate the pans halfway through.
  12. Remove from the oven and let them rest for 20 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 300°. 
  13. Gently transfer the logs to a cutting surface and use a serrated knife to cut them on the diagonal into ½” wide slices. Use a slow, gentle sawing motion to cut through the inclusions. There will be some minor breakage. 
  14. Carefully transfer the slices, cut sides up, back onto the parchment-lined baking sheets. They only need about ¼” space between them, they won’t expand.
  15. Return the biscotti to the oven and bake them for 20 minutes. 
  16. Remove the pans from the oven, flip over the slices, and bake them for another 20 minutes, or until they’re very dry and beginning to brown.
  17. Remove from the oven, cool completely.
1
To toast slivered almonds, spread them in a single layer on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake at 350° until they smell toasted and are lightly brown. Stir them around after about 5 minutes. It only takes about 8-10 minutes total. Be careful they don’t get too dark. Because they’ll be baking again in the biscotti, you want them on the lighter side of toasted.

There are no ads or sponsorships on I Have Doubt!

This post has links to products. They are not affiliate links. I don't get anything from telling you about the products.

Learn more